About a year ago the ABC interviewed me about being a Usability Specialist. They came and videoed me up at the usability lab I use, my home office and even speaking at a conference. It was all quite fun.

Looks like one of the iPhone sites I’ve worked on is live.
Visit: http://www.qantas.com/mobile on your iPhone.
It’s still needs some refinements and it’s basic functionality to start, but it’s magnitudes better than the Jetstar one 🙂

At Web Directions South User Experience, an audience member asked if I thought that people will use mobile apps on their desktop because they are distilled versions of their standard desktop counterparts.
I think:
1. The contextual aspect of SOME mobile services, will mean they won’t be as useful, or not useful at all, on the desktop.
2. There will be mobile applications that work well as ‘widgets’ on desktops and that people will use for a quick interactions or fast access to content.

However, I also believe developers/designers will benefit from re-thinking the interface to simplify it for mobile. Here’s a quote from Cultured Code, the developer of the Mac GTD application; Things:
“While developing Things touch [for iPhone] does draw significant amounts of resources from the desktop version, it is in fact rather beneficial for it too. Recreating Things for the iPhone made simplicity even more predominant. We learned a couple of things from the process that will help us to make the desktop version even better. The same goes for the data model code. Having had the opportunity to incorporate all the lessons we’ve learned from the desktop version resulted in a fresh new code base that will find its way back into Things, providing an even better foundation for its future development.”